The word “hieroglyphs” means “sacred carvings.” Actually, it is not an accurate name for the ancient writing of the Egyptians. It came about because when the early Greeks first saw these writings, they believed they were made by priests for sacred purposes.

But Egyptian hieroglyphics is really one of the oldest known systems of writing. Some of the inscriptions go back to before 3000 B.C., and hieroglyphics continued to be the written language of Egypt for more than 3000 years.

At first the Egyptians used a crude form of picture writing, such as has been used by primitive races throughout the world. The hiero-glyphics were simply pictures, each one representing a natural object. The sun was represented by a disk, the moon by a crescent, water by wavy lines, a man by the figure of a man, and so on.

But these “picturegrams” could not represent the things that the eye could not see—such as thoughts, light, and day. So hieroglyphics in time became symbols of ideas rather than pictures of objects. A disk might suggest “day” instead of only the sun; another symbol meant “turn.” These idea signs were called “ideograms.”

The next step in the development of hieroglyphics was in the use of images to represent sounds instead of the actual objects. For example, the bee might mean, not an insect, but the syllable “bee.” A leaf might represent the syllable “leaf.” By putting these together, they would make the word “belief.” (We are using English words to show how it was done.) Such hieroglyphics used as sound signs, are known as “phonograms.”

Now the Egyptians could write down any words they knew, whether the word meant a thing of which they could draw a picture or not. From these phonograms there developed a series of signs, each representing only a letter. In writing, the Egyptians used only consonants. For example, “drink” would be written “drnk” (using Egyptian words, of course). The Egyptians also kept on using old signs in their writing—ideograms, phonograms, and picturegrams all combined. In time, it became so complicated that the common people couldn’t understand it!